What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you? It's not exactly controversial historically that the USA put the Japanese in concentration camps, even if we labeled them as "internment camps." Roosevelt even explicitly says as much before we put lipstick on the pig by calling them "internment camps."

But most scholars and historians refer to them as concentration camps because that is what they were.

Edit: If you would like, I can also dig up additional evidence that Roosevelt and other American politicians were calling them "concentration camps" after the Executive Order 9066 in March 1942 as well.

This is not downplaying the Holocaust/Shoah and the death camps. It's recognizing our own use of concentration camps in WW2. (We also targeted some German and Italian-American citizens for camps.) Do we commonly associate concentration camps with the Jewish death camps? Yes, because of how utterly horrific that was in the scale of genocide. But Jews, Roma, LGBTQ, Communists, etc. were gathered into concentration camps before the institution of the "Final Solution" and the death camps. AOC is not wrong here. So not calling them concentration camps downplays the use of concentration camps during this time period.

It's funny. For the bulk of his life, George Takei would talk about the his experience in Japanese internment camps, or "prison camps" as he would more appropriately specify. Then Cortez shoots off some false equivocation, and all of a sudden he starts calling them concentration camps.https://www.google.com/amp/s/io9.giz...1533358984/amp

I guess he doesn't want his own history to get left behind as the new false equivalences get running.